The login name problem

November 28, 2011

I have been vaguely considering getting a Twitter account or two
for a while, but so far haven't done so. As
before, the big stumbling block is that
Twitter makes you pick a username and none of the ones that I find
even vaguely attractive are still available. My usual login name
is taken, as normal (it goes fast on
many services). So is my last name
(probably by a relative), my first name,
a variant I sometimes use, a variant
of my last name, and I don't feel
like going on any more (it's too depressing). I can find only one
vaguely appealing variant that isn't already taken (and I'm not
going to say what it is).

Part of the problem is that people on Twitter use your username,
which places a premium on short and memorable ones (especially given
the size limit on tweets). But beyond that it's not just that Twitter
requires me to pick a username per se, it's that it requires me to
pick a public, more or less permanent identifier for myself. This
is a fundamental problem because, as always, good names are hard.
They are hard for people to come up with and there's only a limited
supply of them.

(Twitter apparently allows you to change your username, but I suspect
that that orphans your old Twitter URL and probably confuses people who
knew you under the old name.)

Doing this is generally not actually necessary in most web services.
Flickr, Facebook, and Google Plus (despite its serious flaws)
all get this right; you can start using each service without creating
such a permanent identifier. Oh, Flickr and Facebook have optional
permanent IDs (and G+ may as well someday), but they really are
optional; you can use the service for years (even as a paying
customer) without having to commit yourself to one, and everything
works fine. The most that happens is that the URL for your stuff
is somewhat uglier
that it could otherwise be.

(To be fair, all of these services make you give (or pick) your name and
Flickr makes you pick a username. However, you probably already have a
name you want to use and you can change all of this stuff if you want
to. I've seen people rename themselves on Flickr all the time, not
infrequently to add temporary status messages.)

The usual reason to force your users to pick login names is to generate
URLs for them. However, Flickr shows that this isn't necessary; you
can generate ugly URLs for now and let users improve them to nice URLs
later when they make up their minds. Flickr even has convenient ways of
referring to people who have not done so.

(To be fair, what differentiates Twitter from Flickr here is that
Twitter wants people to be able to enter tweets as essentially plain
text from outside itself; Flickr is content to require you to use its
special markup to refer to other Flickr accounts.)